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OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 

By TALCOTT WILLIAMS 

FROM THE CENTURY MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER, IIJIZ 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

By AGNES REPPLIER 
1 

FROM THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, NOVEMBER, I912 




CLEVELAND 

PRIVATELY PRINTED 

1912 






Q%EETINGS from the Librarian 
and the ^ice-Librarians to their 
associates in the Cleveland Tublic 
Library and the Western c I{eserve 
Library School 

Christmas 7 9 12 



Reprinted by the kind permission of the Authors and the Publishers, 
and with the approval of the sons of Dr. Furness 

Copyrighted, igi2, by The Century Company 
Copyrighted, IQI2, by The Atlantic Monthly Company 

The portrait is a copy of the last photograph of Dr. Furness, 

■which was taken in IQ08, and is furnished by 

his son, IV. H. Furness, 3d 



red from 

. fice. 



OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 

THE LATE HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

NOVEMBER 2, 1833 AUGUST I 3, I9I2 






OUR GREAT 
SHAKSPERE CRITIC 

BY TALCOTT WILLIAMS 

NLY a great man can accomplish a 
great task. For fifteen of Shakspere's 
most familiar plays, Horace Howard 
Furness condensed the criticism of 
three centuries for each play in a single volume, 
save Ham/etywhich has two. 1 From 6000 to 8000 
works have been published on Shakspere. All 
on each play is brought within the compass of 
its volume. Who holds this volume holds the 
fruits of all past criticism and comment on the 
play. 

Mere industry can do much, but mere indus- 
try could never build the monument of these 
volumes. I confess I never look at the im- 
pressive row without amazement at the labor for 
which they stand. It would be much, if this 
were all. Long labor of this order grinds like a 

1 The plays edited by Dr. Furness are Romeo and Juliet, 
1871 ; Macbeth, 1873; Hamlet, two volumes, 1877; K* n g 
Lear, 1880; Othello, 1886; The Merchant of Venice, 1888; 
As Ton Like It, 1890; The Tempest, 1892; Midsummer- 
Night's Dream, 1895; The Winter's Tale, 1898; Much Ado 
about Nothing, 1899 > Twelfth Night, 1901 ; Love* s Labour' s 
Lost, 1904; Antony and Cleopatra, 1909, and Cymbeline, 
completed and to appear. His son Horace Howard Furness, 
Jr., will complete his father's task, and has already published 
Richard III, 1 9 1 1 , and revised Macbeth. 



6 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 

glacier over a writer's style and individuality. 
Textual criticism saps men. There is a certain 
form of stupidity never found except in c notes.' 

Small have continual plodders ever won 
Save bare authority, from others' books. 

Nothing saves a man from this but personality. 
The first great tonic is humor. Dr. Furness, 
man and work together, brim with it. Who else 
would have made a merry mark of the one word in 
Shakspere — in The Tempest , 'young scamels from 
the rock' — for which no one has ever sug- 
gested a convincing or even plausible meaning? 
The humor needed to salt these barrels and bar- 
rels of Shaksperian pemmican is much more 
than the capacity to see a joke. This is to hu- 
mor what a pocket-dictionary is to an encylope- 
dia. What is needed for adequate comment on 
Shakspere, the most English of all figures in 
the world of letters, is that numberless capacity 
to see the broad laugh in all things which lies 
so near to tears that when the coin of fate is 
flipped no man knows which is to be uppermost. 
This gives sanity. It enables the editor of a 
Variorum to know from time to time what a fool 
a German scholar can make of himself and his 
author. I suppose no man could see Horace 
Howard Furness, that solid figure, that sturdy 
step, that firm face of roomy planes and liberal 
modeling, those twinkling eyes, that air of benig- 
nant wisdom and general good-nature, without 



OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC J 

seeing that the worst joke of all, life itself, could 
not daunt this resolution or dull this humor. 

There is a look we all know on the face of the 
judge — a detached habit of thought. It comes 
on the bench, and it comes, too, let me assure 
you, if a man has had before his bar for forty 
years all the culprits who for two centuries have 
been writing about Shakspere. His beam will 
stand sure and he will c poise the cause in jus- 
tice' equal scales.' There are scholars whose 
lives are given to the great in letters who be- 
come surfeited with honey and 'in the taste con- 
found the appetite.' Nothing saves from this 
but the incommunicable capacity for the percep- 
tion of the best. This capacity grows by what 
it feeds upon. Through these volumes there has 
grown certainty of touch and serenity of judg- 
ment, but from the first issue there was apparent, 
as in the man, the norm which is not to be cor- 
rupted even by the Elizabethan extravagance of 
the greatest of Elizabethans. 

Dr. Furness came to his life task through the 
Kemble tradition. The Kembles, who succeeded 
Garrick, first gave dignity to Shakspere. Three 
critics of the contemporary stage, dramatic crit- 
ics all, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt, two of 
them working journalists, began the present at- 
titude. It has since been impossible for any 
scholar to say, as Samuel Johnson did, that a pas- 
sage in a third-rate play, Congreve's 'Mourning 
Bride,' was better than anything in Shakspere. 



8 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 

The stage was dear to him, and he believed 
that no play could be adequately understood 
unless it was heard. The foremost players of 
his day he knew, and each had counseled with 
him, and he had gladly learned from them. With 
Fanny Kemble and her light touch and perspic- 
uous, penetrating interpretation as a model, he 
read the familiar plays himself to many audiences, 
interspersing comment. To all who read or act 
he was a living proof that lines are 'read' by 
the mind and that he or she who fully understands 
will fully express, and he or she alone. Deaf as 
he was, stress, cadence, emphasis, intonation, and 
expression were as manifold, accurate, and illu- 
minating as his comment. All was suffused with 
the cheer and glow of strength, and had behind 
that incomparable organ of interpretation, a mind 
that knew, loved, and voiced the inner meaning 
of the uttered word. 

It is now sixty-five years since Dr. Furness, 
a boy of fourteen, received from Fanny Kemble 
a season ticket for her readings. In her readings 
she sat at a green baize-covered table still cher- 
ished in his library. She made him a Shak- 
sperian for life. He was living in a city which, 
until Boston took its place a little over twenty 
years ago, as Chicago is doing to-day, gave the 
stage a more serious, steady, intelligent, and con- 
sistent support than any other. 

To a local stage possessing this tradition the 
Philadelphia of threescore years ago added 



OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 9 

through his father, William Henry Furness, for 
fifty years head of the Unitarian Church founded 
by Joseph Priestley, a more intimate contact 
with the romantic movement in England than 
fell to other young Americans of the period. It 
was in Philadelphia that Wordsworth was first 
appreciated at his full value by an American. It 
was there that Coleridge was first printed. There, 
in a commonwealth for two centuries nearer Ger- 
many than any other American state, German 
translation began. William Henry Furness early 
addressed himself to this field. His daughter, 
Mrs. Annis Lee Wister, continued the task 
through thirty years, her last work appearing in a 
volume of her brother's Variorum series. Where 
other commentators in our tongue, in either 
home of our race, have looked to English com- 
ment, Dr. Furness from the first significant ded- 
ication of his Hamlet (1877), written in personal 
exultation over German triumph as proving 
Germany no longer the ( Hamlet of Nations,' 
has seen Shakspere as a world poet, has come 
close to German authority and research, and 
equaled its thorough and exact character with- 
out falling into its pedantry or its far-fetched 
gloss. 

From many causes he knew all it is to be a 
gentleman, and when every year he rose as dean 
of the Shakspere Society on St. George's day to 
give the solitary toast, 'William Shakspere, 
gentleman,' it was on the last word that;his 



IO OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 

sturdy accent fell. Beyond all the other great 
voices of our tongue, Shakspere was 'gentle.' 
The author of Coriolanus loathed the general 
mass. He scarce mentions it without touching 
on its evil smell. Its sweaty nightcap ever stank 
in his nostrils. Certain sympathies are needed 
for full critical appreciation of the poet who was 
the last word of the feudalism of the past to the 
democracy of the future, and these sympathies 
Dr. Furness had. 

The Shakspere Society first began his study. 
For sixty-one years its fortnightly meetings have 
gathered a group of men foremost in Philadel- 
phia. One has read Shakspere there with a 
cabinet-minister, a chancellor of the bar associa- 
tion, a judge of the first rank, a great physician 
as well known in the art of letters as in the let- 
ters of his art, and a novelist whose best seller 
has not had its total exceeded. It was in a like 
practical atmosphere that, a young man not yet 
thirty, Dr. Furness was stirred half a century 
ago to try to compare texts by the aid of a scrap- 
book. Out of this grew the Variorum, first with 
the firsL folio for a basis and later the Cambridge 
text. He had leisure, a perilous gift. He early 
collected, until 7000 volumes were at hand in a 
building for their use; but most collectors are 
swamped by their apparatus. C A Concordance 
of Shaksperian Poems,' 1874, by Mrs. Furness, 
bespoke a common bond in a perfect union. In 
1883 she was taken. After a generation, those 



OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC I I 

who then saw his grief from without will not 
adventure to speak of it. A sense of loss was 
never absent from him. It drove him to ardu- 
ous labors, which the years made a habit of life. 
Save a single volume of his father's intimate 
friendship with Emerson, he wrote nothing but 
the Variorum. His prefaces, his addresses, and 
his letters should, now that he is gone, make a 
volume. He preserved the epistolary gift, lost 
in our day. His simplest note had style, charm, 
and weight. 

In his research he was to the end a firm be- 
liever in the study of the plays and the plays 
alone. The order in which the plays were writ- 
ten did not interest him. For c weak endings,' 
'incomplete lines/ and all the newer apparatus 
of Shakspere study, he had an unconcealed dis- 
regard. It was not for him. He would have ques- 
tioned his personal identity as soon as question 
the personal authorship of Shakspere's plays. 

The happy fortune befell me once at his side 
and over his ear-trumpet to say of him that 
which greatly pleased. It was at the luncheon 
when the New Theatre gave him a gold medal 
and he monopolized the affectionate attention 
of every woman in the room. His appreciation 
gave whatever value there was to my words, in 
which I said that it was not as a scholar unrivaled 
and a critical authority unequaled that he would 
be most loved and remembered, but because his 
work had made accurate study possible to the 



12 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 

wandering player, given the solitary teacher on 
the frontier the best of past criticism, and armed 
the smallest village club with a library of learn- 
ing, making the best of Shakspere the general 
possession of all. It was for this he labored. It 
was this American ideal that inspired him. It 
was in the service of this ideal that he renounced 
all royalties. 

It is only as a friend I write of Horace Howard 
Furness, as one of those that loved and knew. 
It is ever ill writing of one's friends when they 
are gone, but his going changed the very hori- 
zon of life for us all, robbed of its landmark the 
landscape of the years, and left a gap where once 
we all looked up and learned and had new sense 
of the fashion in which long purpose, fulfilled 
and never forgotten, shapes character and carves 
cliffs from which men see afar. 

For forty years he sat at a desk and worked 
to make books from books on a book. In all 
our American life there is no other, few in any 
land, who so encysted himself in a task wholly 
of letters. There goes with this for most, as all 
know, the bent figure, the absent-minded or the 
self-conscious gaze, aloofness from the actual. 
Not he. To the last there was the sturdy, erect 
figure, the ruddy, full face, shaped and blocked 
as of a man of many tasks, the resolute mus- 
tache, the solid chin, the stiff, short, aggressive 
hair, early whitened by tears and tasks — 'your 
white-haired son/ as he wrote in an inimitable 



OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 13 

acknowledgment to his father in one of his vol- 
umes. Even a year from eighty his very step 
was decision. He bore down Chestnut Street in 
his weekly visit from his country home like c a 
royal, good, and gallant ship, freshly beheld in 
all her trim.' 

There is in Philadelphia a little group which 
has dined together just short of four decades 
every three weeks for eight months of each year. 
He was of the first that met, and the last of the 
first to go. To one who began thirty years ago 
as the youngest of those who sat at this board, 
and now, alas ! finds himself among the elder at 
a table peopled with the past, nothing so bulks 
in all the round of a manifold social contact as 
this dominant figure, alert, awake, clear-visioned, 
felt through all this gathered group of men. 
Each of them was himself felt in all the various 
walks of life, on the bench, in law, in medicine, 
in letters, in art, in journalism, and in affairs; 
yet he the center, stone-deaf. How did he do 
it? I do not know. I only saw. He alone had 
the secret. Gay, responsive, indomitable, flash- 
ing sheer personality, and with a big silver ear- 
trumpet moving here and there, into which some 
one at his side poured a reversion of the pass- 
ing talk, who is there whom you know, or whom 
you have known, who could have done it? None 
other that I know. Yet he so did it that one 
felt that the best recipe and assurance of unflag- 
ging talk, of explosive, masculine laughter, of 



14 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 

a perpetual source of the dearest and most pre- 
cious thing on earth, the easy interchange, con- 
flict, and contact of friends with friends — the 
best recipe for all this was to have there a great 
scholar, unable to hear a word until it was drop- 
ped into the silver trumpet, yet giving edge, 
guidance, direction, and inspiration to all the 
flow of mutual utterance that has run in this 
well-worn channel for twoscore years. 

To do this was more like his very self than 
all his throned volumes; and I am not sure but 
that, in the great chancery of existence, it is bet- 
ter worth while to have made friends gay, high- 
spirited, and ready to give a frolic welcome to 
all the years as they came than to be known 
ever after, as he will be, as foremost in his great 
field. It was like him to concentrate all his social 
life on this one group. Elsewhere he was always 
sought and scarcely seen, though his house was 
graced by an open hospitality the loss of which 
in time he made up by night work. How wise 
to know your friends in your forties, and to 
gather them and to be with them to the very 
threshold of the eighties! How far wiser than 
the wandering way in which, like children, we 
fill our hands so full that we can neither use, 
nor give, nor leave, nor enjoy! It was like him 
resolutely to keep this dinner of high talk and 
plain fare, with men who dined much and well 
elsewhere, to a dollar apiece, as a constant pro- 
test against a lavish age which kills all by gild- 



OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC I 5 

ing it, as with the luckless boy in the Medicean 
festival. 

Life was compounded by him of simples; 
but they were 'collected from all simples that 
have virtue under the moon/ He lived in one 
city and loved it. Two homes housed all his 
years. 

He sprang of a goodly ancestry and was justly 
and openly proud of it. He held high the long 
descent of men given to the works of the mind. 
His father was known before him, and his sons 
were known with him and will be known after 
him. 

His heart visibly and frankly warmed, though 
without word or bruit, when in a narrow span of 
years he and his son Horace Howard Furness, 
Jr., published each his volume which garner the 
comment of all the years on a play of Shaks- 
pere. Another son, Dr. W. H. Furness, in the 
same span, wrote an authoritative volume on the 
Dyaks of Borneo, placing in the Museum of the 
University of Pennsylvania the best existing 
monographic collection on the region he studied. 
A daughter, Mrs. Horace Jayne (Caroline Fur- 
ness Jayne), issued the one most important book 
ever published on the perplexing, fascinating, 
and almost unknown field of catVcradles, a mine 
of patient research and accurate, skilful descrip- 
tion. His sister, Mrs. Caspar Wister, published 
the long series of translations from German 
novels the success of which, among a score of 



1 6 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 

failures in this field, was wholly due to the skill 
with which the c translator' adapted this fiction 
'made in Germany ' to the English-speaking 
world. Five years ago this brother and sister 
were at work side by side, Mrs. Wister on the 
proof-sheets of her fortieth German translation, 
c The Lonely House,' by Adolph Streckfuss, and 
he on the proof-sheets of Antony and Cleopatra, 
the twelfth in his monumental march. Her first 
translation, 'Seaside and Fireside Fairies,' from 
George Blum and Louis Wahl, had appeared 
forty-three years, and his Romeo and Juliet 
thirty-six years, before. His brother, Frank Fur- 
ness, whose death preceded his by so short a 
span, was, when a mere lad, in Rush's Lancers, 
and all his life looked the cavalryman, with his 
drooping, yellow mustache and his seamed face. 
He retained to the end the walk of a man who, 
for years together in his youth, has felt the 
saddle-leathers between his legs. Like Lever's 
hero, he once escaped capture by taking a barn- 
yard fence no other man would have dared or 
persuaded his cavalry mount to venture. By 
carrying powder to a battery not only under fire, 
but through burning woods, he won a medal of 
honor. At Cold Harbor he risked life openly 
and flagrantly by walking out between two firing- 
lines a few rods apart to give a wounded Con- 
federate a drink of water. Years later, when there 
came to this dauntless soul heartbreaking grief, 
he solaced himself by finding through a news- 



OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC I 7 

paper friend, who sowed the strange and mov- 
ing tale broadcast in Southern papers, the man 
whose life he had saved, bringing him to Phil- 
adelphia and filling a month with mutual mem- 
ories for both. To the world Frank Furness was 
known as an architect, a pupil of Richard Morris 
Hunt. 

It could be only in such a family that, as a 
family lark at a family dinner, a novel was writ- 
ten, the first chapter by Horace Howard Fur- 
ness, the others in turn by the rest, three sons, 
a daughter, a son-in-law, and a daughter in-law, 
no author to kill a character without the consent 
of its creator, and all printed in seven copies as 
1 Grace Auchester.' I foresee a pretty penny for 
this volume in catalogues of Shaksperiana a 
century hence. 

It is the odd blunder of a dull world that 
social buoyancy and the notable mind seldom 
march together; but, as an acute thinker has said, 
a man with a strong pair of legs can walk east 
as easily as he walks west, and our great Shak- 
sperian had all the mirth that rang under the 
rafters of the Mermaid. He made the Hasty 
Pudding Club at Harvard. He was the dancer 
of his year and led in the play of more than 
sixty years ago. I like it that after his death there 
were found, preserved through all the half cen- 
tury, the pink tights and the spangled skirt which 
the toil-worn commentator had worn in glad 
youth as Mile. Furnessina. In the world of si- 



I 8 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 

lence in which he lived so long he seemed to 
know laughter by instinct. His speech on the 
' Miseries of Old Age ' at a Harvard dinner 
four years ago swept the tables. He presided 
over a dinner or a meeting marvelously. His 
instinct, his attention, his capacity to interpret a 
look as easily as a word, carried him through all. 
Nor was humor ever far from the ceremonial 
surface of things. For example, at the lunch 
given at the opening of the Bryn Mawr Col- 
lege library — it was on the hottest of June days, 
and he was sweltering under the crimson trap- 
pings and beef-eater hat of his Cambridge degree 
of Litt.Doc. (1899), when a young friend spoke 
a consoling word to him. He replied, c Ah, 
Mademoiselle, il faut souffrir pour etre swell. 9 
The world narrowly missed in him a great 
Arabic scholar. His trip abroad after his grad- 
uation at Harvard carried him far afield. He was 
in Damascus when the Crimean War set the 
East ablaze. He saw Richard Burton, imperi- 
ous-souled, a vision of masterful will, holding 
his consular court ; and to the vision he recurred 
again and again. He had a week or two in the 
desert. He became enamoured of Arabic and 
its study, of which relics exist in a grammar and 
reader that he owned. But his brief days over 
Semitics had this strange by-product. In the 
polychrome Bible, projected by Professor Haupt 
of Johns Hopkins, and halted midway for lack 
of support, Dr. Furness, perhaps the only man 



OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC I 9 

alive so versed in Elizabethan English that it 
was as the tongue to which he was born, and 
knowing enough of Hebrew, furnished the 
translation of the revised text. In the Hebrew 
lyrics and psalms translated for this edition of 
the Old Testament he reached the summit of his 
style, an incomparable mingling of nice scholar- 
ship and exalted utterance. H ow fit it was that 
the Bible and Shakspere should attract the same 
critical capacity ! 

If I were to sum by a single inanimate object 
the temper and tradition of Dr. Furness, I would 
turn to the gloves, in his unrivaled collection, 
which one is glad to believe were Shakspere's. 
They are manifestly the gloves of an Elizabethan 
gentleman not too large in build, gold-embroid- 
ered, and shapely. They were treasured as genu- 
ine by the descendants of Shakspere's son-in- 
law, the physician who attended him in his last 
illness, and were handed down in that family. 
They passed to Garrick, who gave them to Philip 
Kemble, and so by descent again they passed 
from Fanny Kemble to their recent owner. There 
again is the double line of grace, the descent 
both of line and of genius, to make precious the 
gloves that rested on Shakspere's hand, took 
its shape and knew its strength and beauty. 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 




HORACE HOWARD 
FURNESS 

BY AGNES REPPLIER 





ONJECTURAL criticism/ observes 
Dr. Johnson, c demands more than 
humanity possesses, and he that exer- 
cises it with most praise has very fre- 
quent need of indulgence. Let us now be told 
no more of the dull duty of an editor/ 

With these words of soberness ringing in his 
ears, Dr. Furness began more than forty years 
ago the vast labor which has placed him at the 
head of Shakespearean scholars, and has made 
the student world his debtor. He brought to 
bear upon his task qualities essential to its com- 
pletion: patience, balance, a wide acquaintance 
with Elizabethan literature and phraseology, the 
keenness of a greyhound on the track, an incor- 
ruptible sense of proportion, and an apprecia- 
tion, equally just and generous, of his predeces- 
sors' work. Leisure and that rarest of fortune's 
gifts, the command of solitude, made possible 
the industry of his life. Above all, a noble en- 
thusiasm sustained him through years of incred- 
ible drudgery. 'The dull duty of an editor'! 
Well may Dr. Johnson heap scorn upon the 
words. When one is fitted by nature to enjoy 
the pleasure which perfection in literary art can 



give : 



one does not find it dull to live face to face 



24 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

with vital conceptions of humanity, embalmed 
in imperishable verse. 

The first volume of the new Variorum, 
Romeo and Juliet l , was published in 1871. Dr. 
Furness confessed that he chose the play be- 
cause he loved it, and because he thought it 
probable that he would never edit another, — 
an anticipation happily unfulfilled. As he 
worked, he saw more and more clearly the im- 
perative nature of his task; and, in his preface 
to Romeo and Juliet , while giving ample praise 
to Boswell's Variorum of 182 1, he states simply 
and seriously the causes which make it inad- 
equate to-day. Even the Cambridge edition of 
1863, which Dr. Furness held to have created 
an era in Shakespearean literature, and to have 
put all students of Shakespearean text in debt 
to the learned and laborious editors, lacks one 
important detail. There is no word to note the 
adoption or rejection of contested readings by 
various students and commentators. This Dr. 
Furness considered a grave omission. c In dis- 
puted passages/ he wrote, c it is of great inter- 
est to see at a glance on which side lies the 
weight of authority.' 

To read the fourteen prefaces which have en- 
riched the fourteen plays included in the new 
Variorum, is to follow delicately and surely the 
intellectual life of a great scholar. There was an 
expansion of spirit as the work advanced. From 
being absolutely impersonal, an unseen editor, 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 2$ 

arranging and codifying the notes of others, sift- 
ing evidence and recording verdicts, Dr. Fur- 
ness emerged gradually into the broad light of 
day. In the later volumes, every note dealing 
with a disputed point, closes with a judgment, or 
dismisses the dispute as futile. A shrewd humor, 
held well in check, illuminates the dusty path of 
learning. To distinction of style has been added 
the magnetic grace of personality. If we cannot 
say of the Preface, c With this key Dr. Furness 
unlocked his heart,' we can at least learn from it 
how much of his heart he gave smilingly away 
to a lady of such doubtful merit (what is the 
worth of merit in a bad world!) as Cleopatra. 

For the first five plays, Romeo and Juliet, 
Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello, Dr. 
Furness formed his own text. The remaining 
nine were reprinted from the First Folio. 

6 Who am 1/ observes the conservative editor, 
in justification of this change of plan, c that I 
should thrust myself in between the student and 
the text, as though in me resided the power to 
restore Shakespeare's own words?' This instinct 
of conservatism strengthened in Dr. Furness 
with every year of work, until it became a guid- 
ing principle, making for vigilance and lucidity. 
c Those who know the most,' he was wont to 
say, c venture the least'; and his own ventures 
are so carefully considered as to lose all chance 
of hazard. Upon internal evidence, 'which is 
of imagination all compact,' he looked forever 



26 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

askance. Hypothetical allusions to historic per- 
sonages and events (we like to think that there are 
half-a-dozen such crowded into a score of Ober- 
on's lines), he dismissed as unworthy of critical 
consideration. Even when points of resemblance 
came as close as do the affectations of speech in 
Lovers Labour s Lost to the weary euphuisms of 
Lyly, Dr. Furness stoutly refused to trace a dim 
connection. An undecipherable word or phrase 
never presented itself to his level judgment as 
a species of riddle, to be guessed at frantically 
until the end of time. If he did not know what 
the word or the phrase meant, he said so, and 
went on his way rejoicing. Who can forget his 
avowal of 'utter, invincible ignorance' as to the 
mysterious 'scamels' which Caliban finds on the 
rock, and his determination to retain the word 
as it stands. 'From the very beginning of the 
Play/ he reminds us, c we know that the scene 
lies in an enchanted island. Is this to be for- 
gotten? Since the air is full of sweet sounds, 
why may not the rocks be inhabited by un- 
known birds of gay plumage, or by vague an- 
imals of a grateful and appetizing plumpness? 
Let the picture remain of the dashing rocks, the 
stealthy, freckled whelp, and, in the clutch of 
his long nails, a young and tender scamel/ 

So, too, with Mark Antony's c Arme-gaunt 
Steede,' which, since the publication of the First 
Folio, has supplied abundant matter for con- 
jecture: 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 27 

he nodded, 
And soberly did mount an Arme-gaunt Steede. 

Dr. Furness prints conscientiously two solid 
pages of notes anent this mysterious epithet, 
giving us every suggestion that has been prof- 
fered and discarded concerning its possible signif- 
icance; at the close of which exhaustive survey 
he adds serenely: c In view of the formidable, 
not to say appalling combination of equine qual- 
ities and armourer's art which has been detected 
in this adjective, Antony would have been more 
than mortal had he not approached his steed 
with extreme caution,and mounted it "soberly." 
Far more remarkable is the incurious attitude 
preserved by Dr. Furness in regard to the chro- 
nology of Shakespeare's plays, his indifference 
to dates which have cost other commentators 
years of study and speculation. Many and stern 
were the reproaches hurled at him for this in- 
difference, but he remained indifferent still. In- 
deed it was his most noteworthy characteristic 
that, while regarding his own work with a stead- 
fast and sane humility, he was wholly unvexed 
and unmoved by criticism. Immaculately free 
from what Dr. Johnson terms 'the acrimony of 
scholiasts,' he never assumed an editor's role 
to be an c intellectual egg-dance ' amid a host of 
sensitive interests. Nor did he begrudge, even 
to the youngest critic, the pleasure of flaunting 
some innocent rags of research — the mere swad- 
dling clothes of learning — in the face of his pro- 



28 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

found and gentle scholarship. c Great tranquil- 
lity of heart hath he who careth neither for 
praise nor blame/ said the wise a Kempis, who 
knew whereof he spoke; and I have many times 
heard Dr. Furness quote with approval those 
stern and splendid lines in which Dr. Johnson, 
confiding his dictionary to the public, expresses 
his frigid insensibility as to its reception. 

Indifference to dates was but one feature ot 
that serene unconcern with which Dr. Furness 
regarded the hidden personality of Shakespeare. 
He was not merely content, he seemed glad to 
know no more of the poet over whom he had 
spent his life; and because 'every assertion con- 
nected with Shakespeare is accompanied, as a 
ground-tone, by the refrain "it is not unlikely," 
he found such assertions to be little worth his 
while. c We cannot tell whether Shakespeare was 
peevish or gentle,' he wrote, f sedate or mercurial, 
generous or selfish, dignified or merry; whether 
he was a Protestant or a Catholic, whether he 
loved his home or liked to gad abroad, whether 
he was jocund or sombre, or whether he was all 
these things by turns, and nothing long/ 

Even the Sonnets afforded to Dr. Furness's 
mind no key to the enigma. He held that Shake- 
speare followed the fashion of his day, a fashion 
borrowed from Italy, which made of the sonnet 
a personal thing (no Italian would have dreamed 
of writing a sonnet on Venice and the Rialto as 
Wordsworth wrote one on London and West- 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 29 

minster Bridge) ; and that the poet's essentially 
dramatic spirit gave to his own sonnets a dra- 
matic form. They seem spoken by one human 
being to another, spoken in accents of grief, of 
doubt, of ecstasy, of despair; but in this man- 
ner do all Shakespeare's characters speak. This 
is the impelling force of the dramatic spirit, 
peopling earth and sky; not the impelling force 
of the personal spirit, seeking to take the world 
into its confidence. Shakespeare may even be 
permitted to bewail his outcast state, without 
our beginning straightway to sniff a peccadillo. 
That the dramatic spirit which baffles scrutiny 
should have made a powerful appeal to Dr. 
Furness was right and reasonable. It was the 
appeal of consanguinity. Like all his race, he 
had the actor's gifts: not only spirit and fire in 
declamation, not only the flexible voice and the 
appropriate gesture; but the power to lose him- 
self past finding in every character he portrayed. 
Those who have heard him read, know what I 
mean. The clarion call of Henry the Fifth be- 
fore the gates of Harfleur, his prayer upon the 
field of Agincourt, — these things were not mere 
elocution, however noble and effective; they were 
passionate appeals to man and God, breaking 
from the lips of one whose head was reeling with 
the joy of battle, whose heart was heavy with 
the awful burden of authority. It was as a boy 
of fourteen that Dr. Furness first heard Fanny 
Kemble (Mrs. Peirce Butler) read Shakespeare's 



3<D HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

plays, and his enthusiasm awoke, never to sleep 
again. It was as a listener, not as a student, that 
he received his most powerful and durable im- 
pressions. To this early influence was due, in 
large measure, the preservation of the dramatic 
feeling through a long life of patient and labori- 
ous research. 

From Fanny Kemble, too, came the gift of 
Shakespeare's stage gloves, most precious and 
most honored of relics. Their history is a not- 
able one. In 1746 they were presnted by Wil- 
liam Shakespeare, a poor glazier, c whose father 
and our poet were brothers' children,' to John 
Ward, when that generous actor played Othello 
at Stratford-on-Avon, and devoted the night's 
receipts to repairing Shakespeare's monument 
in the church. John Ward, with a sense of fit- 
ness as pleasing as it is rare, gave these gloves 
in 1769 to David Garrick, who bequeathed them 
to his widow, who bequeathed them to Mrs. 
Siddons, who bequeathed them to her daughter, 
Cecilia, who gave them to Fanny Kemble, who 
gave them to Dr. Furness in 1874. It is not 
often, in these days of millionaire collectors, 
that the right things belong to the right people 
so consistently and persistently as have these 
worn gauntlets. 

Dr. Furness's power of sustained labor seemed 
well-nigh miraculous to a generation which stands 
forever in need of rest and change of scene. 
For forty years he worked on an average ten 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 3 I 

hours out of the twenty-four and, under pres- 
sure, thought little of adding a few hours more. 
For twenty years he lived in his country-seat at 
Wallingford, remote from the importunities of 
the town. Here in the uninvaded seclusion of 
his noble library he sat, resolute and absorbed, 
while the long quiet days merged into the quiet 
nights. 

With the inspired sagacity of the scholar, he 
admitted to his solitude only the scholar's nat- 
ural friend and ally, the cat. Generations of cats 
sat blinking at him with affectionate contempt 
as volume after volume of the Variorum drew 
to its appointed close. Companionable cats ac- 
companied him on his daily walks through sun- 
ny garden and shaded avenue, marching before 
him with tail erect, rubbing themselves conde- 
scendingly against his legs, or pausing, with 
plaintive paw upraised, to intimate that the stroll 
had lasted long enough. Warrior cats, to whom 
was granted the boon of an early and honorable 
death, drank delight of battle with their peers 
on many a moonlight night, and returned in 
the morning to show their scars to a master who 
reverenced valor. Siamese cats, their pale-blue 
eyes shadowed by desires that no one under- 
stood, brought their lonely, troubled little hearts 
to his feet for solace. And all these wise beasts 
knew that silence reigned in the long working 
hours. They lent the grace of their undisturb- 
ing presence to the scholar who loved to lift his 



32 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

head, ponder for a moment over the soul-satis- 
fying nature of their idleness, and return to his 
books again. 

'To those who think, life is a comedy; to 
those who feel, a tragedy.' Dr. Furness, think- 
ing profoundly, feeling intensely, with a sad 
heart and a gay temper (that most charming and 
lovable combination!) replaced illusions with 
philosophy. His rare powers of conversation, 
his marvelous memory, his information, which, 
unlike the information of Macaulay, was never 
c more than the occasion required,' his unfailing 
humor, his beautiful vocabulary, rich yet pre- 
cise, his swift light sentences, conveying import- 
ant conclusions, all made him the most engag- 
ing of companions. There was no talk like his, 
— so full of substance, so innocent of pedantry, so 
perfect in form, so sweetened by courtesy. Well 
might it have been said of him, as Johnson said 
of Burke: 'If a stranger were to go by chance 
at the same time with him under a shed to shun 
a shower, he would think, "This is an extra- 
ordinary man/" 

The serenity with which Dr. Furness submit- 
ted to encroachments on his time and strength 
equaled the serenity of Sir Walter Scott. The 
hospitality of Lindenshade, like the hospitality 
of Abbotsford, was boundless. The kindness 
of its master was invincible. Poets sent him 
their verses, dramatists their plays, and novelists 
their stories. Authors who meditated writing 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS $$ 

essays on Shakespeare's dogs, or oaths, or fire- 
arms, and who seemed unaware of the existence 
of a concordance, sought from him counsel and 
assistance. People who were good enough to 
believe that Shakespeare really wrote the plays 
attributed to him by his contemporaries, were 
anxious that Dr. Furness should be made aware 
of the liberal nature of their views. To one and 
all the great scholar lent a weary and patient ear. 
To one and all he gave more than their utmost 
dues. 

A man of exquisite charity, speaking evil of 
none; a man of indestructible courtesy, whose 
home was open to his friends, whose scant leisure 
was placed at their disposal, whose kindness en- 
veloped them like sunshine; yet none the less a 
man whose reserves — unsuspected by many — 
were proof against all ; a past master of the art 
of hiding his soul, c addicted to silent pleasures, 
accessible to silent pains.' It is not the portent- 
ous gravity of the Sphinx which defies the probe, 
but the smiling gayety which seems so free from 
guile. One had to know Dr. Furness long and 
intimately, to understand that his dominant note 
was dramatic, not personal, and that his facile 
speech betrayed nothing it was made to hide. 

That the task upon which his life had been 
spent, and which his death left uncompleted, 
should be taken up by his son, was to Dr. Fur- 
ness a source of measureless content. I n the pref- 
ace to The Tempest, published in 1892, he re- 



34 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

corded his indebtedness to his father, to c the 
hand whose cunning ninety years have not 
abated/ In the preface to the revised edition of 
Macbeth, published in 1903, he recorded his in- 
debtedness to his son, to the younger hand which 
had been intrusted with the work, and had ac- 
complished it so deftly. When Dr. Furness died 
in August, his last volume, Cyrnbeline, was fast 
approaching completion. It will be published in 
mid-winter, just as he left it, the fifteenth play 
of his editing; and with it will appear Julius 
Ccesar^ the third play edited by Mr. Horace 
Howard Furness, Jr. A monument of scholar- 
ship, a verdict, final for many years to come, a 
rich mine for possible successors. 

For Dr. Furness always maintained that he 
would have many followers in the field of Shake- 
spearean research, that, in the future, other stu- 
dents would do his work over again, and do it 
differently. He was content to be a step of the 
ladder, and he knew better than most men that 
'the labour we delight in physics pain/ The 
beauty of his surroundings, the magnitude and 
perfection of his library, the honors done him 
by English and American universities, the close 
companionship of his third son, Dr. William 
Henry Furness, intrepid traveler and explorer, 
— these things lent dignity and relish to his life. 
He lived it bravely and mirthfully; he stood 
ready to lay it down without regret. 

Six weeks before his death, being then in per- 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 35 

feet health, he wrote to me: 'My; grave yawns 
at my feet. I look down into it, and very snug 
and comfortable it seems/ In the gallant accept- 
ance of life and death lies all that gives worth 
to man. 



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